The effect of capitalism is to steer human selfishness so that, through the invisible hand of competition, the energies of the capitalist produce the abundance from which the whole society benefits. Moreover, capitalism encourages entrepreneurs to act with consid- eration for others even when their ultimate motive is to benefit themselves. So while profit remains the final goal, entrepreneurs spend the better part of each day figuring out how better to serve the needs of their actual and potential customers. They are opera- tionally, if not intentionally, altruistic. As Samuel Johnson once put it, “There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently occupied than in getting money.” One may say that capitalism civilizes greed in much the same way that marriage civilizes lust. Both institutions seek to domesticate wayward or fallen human impulses in socially beneficial ways.
And when it came to capitalism, Christian civilization created the basic rules of modern economics. In the Middle Ages, Rodney Stark shows, people first realized that prices should be determined through supply and demand. In the past, prices had been set by law or custom. But Albertus Magnus, a thirteenth-century Dominican friar, explained that prices reflect “what goods are worth according to the estimate of the market at the time of sale.” And this of course is what we believe now
In his classic work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber traces the rise of capitalism to a spirit of calling or election introduced by Calvinism. But as in the case of market pricing, the core elements of capitalism all predate the Reformation. Some scholars have traced them to the monastery communities of the early Christian era, in which bandsof monks demonstrated a strong work ethic, practiced specialization and division of labor, borrowed and lent money, and engaged in long-distance trade involving a fairly wide range of foodstuffs and other commodities. Stark argues that “all of the essential features of capitalism … are to be found from the twelfth century on, in the city republicans of Italy, such as Venice, Genoa, or Florence.”
My goal here is not to settle the issue of which Christians got there first. Capitalism grew in stages, each of them influenced by a different aspect of Christianity. When Francis Bacon and Descartes called for a technological system in which man becomes a master and possessor of nature, they made their case in terms of recovering the prosperity of the Garden of Eden. When Locke defended property rights and the cultivation of nature by practical intelligence, he saw humans as imitating the creativity of God and thus acting “in His image.” Even today we think of work in terms of a “calling” or “vocation.” In this Christian understanding, we receive our talents from God and use them to benefit ourselves, our families, and our society in line with God’s will for us.
With capitalism and prosperity came something new: the idea of progress. This is the notion that things are getting better and will continue to get better in the future. History is seen as moving in a straight line, onward and upward. In the past century the idea of progress has seen some strange and ugly manifestations, such as “survival of the fittest” and the supposedly inevitable “revolution of the proletariat.” Tarred as it now may be, the ideal of progress endures, and in some form it is now part of the furniture of the modern mind. Most of us, for example, fully expect our children to live better than we do. We also tend to believe in moral progress. The abolition of slavery, for instance, seems to be an irreversible moral achievement. We hope that future generations will be more morally enlightened than we are, take better care of the planet, and stop killing the unborn.
